Tuesday, April 25, 2006

Like A Cloud

"If you don't use your own imagination, somebody else is going to use it for you."

What made Ron so great as an artist-writer and teacher was that he was a model of Progressive Writerly Action. For him, writing and making things was a way of life. It was survival. If you woke up in the morning and could not get the junk out of your head and onto the material canvas - and for him the screen offered an extensible materiality - then you were just as good being dead.

He said: "make it up is you go along" or create work that "like a cloud, changes as it goes."

Making it UP. UP was the name of his first novel back in 1967. Check it OUT (OUT was the name of his second novel).

UPDATE: In his last story, Running On Empty, Ron wrote:

It was like he had lived inside his imagination, anyway, living the life he had imagined and created for himself. The life he had imagined in his teens was almost identical with the one he looked back on in his 70s. He had even guessed well at his disappointments: obscurity, relative poverty, cult status.